Canonicity, Anonymity, Exemplarity

As with nearly all of Goethe’s literary output, the
Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (Confessions of
a Beautiful Soul) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) is endowed with an
irrevocable air of canonicity. The unnamed title figure, generally
referred to either as the beautiful soul or as the
Stiftsdame, carries with her an exemplarity that by
now seems inevitable—though it is noteworthy that scholars remain
undecided as to whether she is a positive or a negative example.
Nevertheless, this sixth book of the novel, which interrupts the
Bildungsweg of the male protagonist to such an extent
that Schiller worried that to some readers it might appear “als
wenn die Geschichte stillestünde” (as though the story had stood
still), is generally viewed as a formative contribution to
discussions on religion and feminine identity. This reception
history, though we neither can nor should wish to erase it, has the
effect of obscuring both the sheer strangeness of the title
character and the connection to other texts that also participated
in these discourses about family, religious or secular care of the
self, and the role of women in society.

Like Goethe’s Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, the
anonymous 1803 Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, von ihr
selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a Poisoner, Written
by Herself) and the 1806 Bekenntnisse einer schönen
Seele, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a
Beautiful Soul, Written by Herself—likewise anonymous but
often attributed to Friederike Helene Unger) are long,
single-perspective, first-person narratives supposedly written by
women who are unusually unattached. They examine—at length, and
with nuance and, I would claim, sensitivity—a mode of life that was
ignored or effaced by dominant narratives that idealized the
marriage partnership and motherhood, and they begin to advance
alternatives to those narratives. All three, by staging themselves
as autobiographical confessions created by women, assert the
interest and value of the feminine voice even—or perhaps
especially—when the female subject remains unattached. None of the
three women has children of her own: both “beautiful souls” are
unmarried; the poisoner’s marriage is destroyed when she proves to
be infertile, and she later poisons her husband. Each of these
texts represents a different kind of engagement both with the genre
of pseudo-autobiographical confession and with the place an
unattached woman occupies in society, and each leads to a different
result (a word that is less problematic than is perhaps usual in
the case of literary texts because all three do make some kind of
explicit claim to a didactic message).

The similarity of these title characters should not, however,
obscure the significant differences in their authorship and modes
of circulation. It must be noted that Goethe is an established male
author writing in a female voice (somewhat unusually for him—there
is no other extended first-person narrative from a female
perspective in his oeuvre), whereas the other two texts were
published anonymously and their authorship remains disputed. The
Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, von ihr selbst
geschrieben is now most often attributed to Friederike
Helene Unger, the wife of the publisher Johann Friedrich Unger; she
also translated Rousseau’s Confessions into German.
Unger was the author of several other novels—most notably
Julchen Grünthal: Eine Pensionsgeschichte
(Julchen Grünthal: A Boarding-School Story, first
published 1784, revised and expanded in 1799)—all of which were
published anonymously by her husband’s press. Magdalene Heuser, in
her stylistic analysis of the Bekenntnisse in
comparison to Unger’s known works, finds Unger’s authorship of the
1806 text likely, as does Susanne Zantop in the afterword to the
1991 reprinting of the novel, which lists Unger’s name, albeit in
brackets, on the title page. The other most frequent candidate for
authorship is Paul Ferdinand Friedrich Buchholz, who worked as an
author, editor, and commentator for Johann Friedrich Unger’s
publishing house. The strongest evidence for his authorship is a
listing for Buchholz in Julius Eduard Hitzig’s Gelehrtes
Berlin im Jahre 1825 (Learned Berlin in the Year
1825), which counts both the 1806 Bekenntnisse einer
schönen Seele and the 1803 Bekenntnisse einer
Giftmischerin under Buchholz’s name...

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